Your Attention Please!

This little tidbit has gone viral the last three days but in case some of you haven't seen it I thought I would share...

Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie. Both of these men died in the same month of the same year. Steve was largely considered as a hero whereas Dennis was widely ignored. Only a handful of programmers who know the real value of his work would actually know about Ritchie's death.

Without Steve, there is no Apple, iPod, iPad and Macintosh.

But without Ritchie, there is no C. And without C, there is no Unix, Windows or Linux. Without C, there is no C++ and no Objective C. Which means there is no MacOS X, no iOS, no Photoshop, no FLstudio, no Firefox, no Safari, no Google Chrome, no Playstation, no XBox. As a matter of fact, almost 90% if ALL APPLICATIONS IN THE WORLD are written in C, C++ or Objective C.

It's already too late we all know it. Yet, if you think Dennis deserves appreciation for his enormous contribution to the world of technology that we live in, do share this. Do spread this. Seriously.

Free M.I.T. Courses

My oldest son gave me a heads up on the free online courses available from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  The MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content.

MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT. Here is a great overview of the site. You can also view the entire course list by department.

Share this with your HR Department and even your kids! This is an incredible opportunity to soak in knowledge from one of the world's premier learning institution!

T-SQL

Somehow I've posted a lot of resources for SQL but never for introductory or T-SQL. Consider this oversight fixed!

Here is a good 8-minute introductory video on T-SQL (there are other videos from SQL Tutorials.com...free and fee based).  VTC also has 14 free online tutorials in addition to 80+ other t-SQL lessons for a very reasonable price.

If the book format is more to your liking (hardcopy or ebook) then O'Reilly has the book for you.

You might also be interested in a well-done "Intro to SQL" tutorial located here.

Finally don't forget that we teach a three-day T-SQL class about here 6 weeks. Find of the schedule to our next class here.

Contests

The week starts off with several announcements for IT contests. Facebook has it's 2nd Annual Hacker Cup where you can win $5,000. Top Coder always has some high level contests and CodeChef usually has something cool to participate in each month.

Finally, my own IT Skills Contest just kicked off a SharePoint 2010 Admin contest.

Have fun!

Really! It's been two weeks?

I delude myself that I was depriving everyone of my tremendous knowledge by not posting since December 20th. To make it up to everyone I am sharing information on a site that features SharePoint Task-Oriented tutorials (since you use SharePoint to do tasks...see how logical my mind works).

There's three levels of tutorials available from SharePoint-Videos.com (Over 300 from beginner, intermediate and advanced). Topics include creating a SharePoint site, adding users to a site, adding web parts to a site, introducing document management, using the recycle bin, alerts, subscribing to list security overview, understanding master pages, My Sites, understanding and using site columns, creating and using blog sites in SharePoint, exploring SharePoint's central administration and many, many more. 

Quite a few of the video tutorials are free but the entire library is only $20 a month!